All posts by Vinicius Manzano

Realtime Assignment

Subject:

Reddit is an mix between social networking and news website with the information being provided by the users or linked to other website. The site uses a system of upvotes and downvotes to the determine the most trending topics, but sometimes (because of number of comments and others undisclosed variables) some topics with less upvotes than others end up in first position and that can be little confusing. That being said my proposal will be a easier way to display, with a bar graphic that provides easy comparison between the top ten posts, the trending posts and the subject that is compelling me on this project is, through the graphic, determine why some topics are more trending than others regardless of number of upvotes.

The Data:

The reddit web api: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/reddit

Reddit api provides all the data needed for the project, initially I will use: the balance of votes, the number of comments, position of the topic, number of comments, title and category of the post. There is no restriction in the api, no key needed to make the calls.

Design:

Little Big Data : The Phisiology of Dota 2

Subject: A game of Dota is so full of little interactions and variations that can be analyzed like: the position of the mouse on the screen at a given time or the keypresses along the game. So the purpose is to shed a light on how a specific role is played, or how a patch changes how the game is played.

The Data: I pretend to generate my own dataset, if not possible to use something like this I could use a dumped dataset (http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/datasets/dota-2-winrates-percentages/versions/1.txt) or the tables from dotabuff(http://dotabuff.com/heroes/impact?date=patch_6.79)

Tools: Mostly graphic tools (illustrator and  photoshop) and to analyze the data Excel or processing.

Research Assignment- Vinicius Manzano

Data Visualization Aggregator
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
Minimalist. If I had to define the most striking caracteristic of Information is Beautiful, that would be it. The website solely focuses on displaying images of the graphics and data.

Artist/Designer
http://visual.ly/
Visually is a website/company that focuses on bringing data in different forms like: infographics, videos, interactive tools, among others. They made works for companies like Heineken, Nissan and Cisco.

Discussion Forum
http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/
Reddit is the front-page of the internet, as they call themselves. And that is indeed true, you can find almost anything in there, and the sub-reddit for all you can imagine has some interesting discussions and insights on the topic.

Data Collection Tool
http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/heatmapjs/
A Javascript library for creating a heatmap of the mouse pointer while navigating websites or apps in a computer. Incredibly useful for Information Architecture and UX designers.

A visualization
http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/projects/armsglobe/
An amazing example of what can be made with the power of HTML5 and WebGL. It’s a map of all the legal exports and imports of firearms around the globe, with a myriad of filters like military, civilian and year of the transaction.

Visualization Tool
http://app.raw.densitydesign.org/#/
A tool specifically designed for creating data visualizations based on raw spreadsheet information hence the name RAW. Despite being simple, the visualizations are very  complete and can be customized.

Data Ethics
http://zehfernandes.com/the-evil-side-of-google/
The brazilian designer José Fernandes discusses why Google can’t handle the complexity of human interests in a transparent way. Delivering data filtered by interests defined by previous searches, the search engine can sometimes “hide” meaningful information from the user.

Data Source
http://data.gov.au/dataset
A dataset for all thing related to Australia. Some other countries had a similar website, but none of them were as complete and well formatted as the australian one.

Criticism
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/06/how-big-data-and-statistical-modeling-are-changing-video-games.html
A interesting post and video about how data visualization and gathering is changing the Video Game Industry. It describes how some companies are using Data gathered from the players to make real time changes in games in order to increase the engagement and revenue from the games.

A Book
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Visualizations-Noah-Iliinsky/dp/1449312284
Being already a reader of the books by O’Reilly Media (their book in Information Architecture is amazing) it was only logical to choose their work in Designing Data Visualization. Written by Noah Iliinsky and Julia Steele, it covers a variety of topics. The only downside being that is a book about visual data and yet it is printed in greyscale.

Redesign Assignment – Vinicius Manzano

Data visualization chosen: http://tinyurl.com/Datavys

Link to the full resolution visualization: http://tinyurl.com/opusltf

The main problem I had with this visualization is that, despite it being fairly minimalistic, there was no way to compare the top subject to the bottom subject.

So what I did was re-create the visualization using a bar graphics style, this way a viewer can easily perceive how much more you have to work in Georgia to buy a beer compared to the other countries.